Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 17, 2003 @11:00AM
from the hey-this-one-is-free dept.

Eater writes "With a 1.1 release imminent, this review may be of interest to users of Linux on the desktop. OpenOffice.org is a group of small projects that
collectively make up the open source community's
premier office suite. Based on code from Sun's
StarOffice and maintained by a worldwide community
of developers, the OpenOffice.org project provides
a full-featured office application suite. It
includes a language independent API and open
XML-based file formats." Read on for the rest of Eater's review.

With a stable 1.0 release and spectacular
cross-platform functionality, it's finally time
to seriously consider putting this software to
work in your company. Whether you are completely
new to OpenOffice.org or just moving from its
predecessor StarOffice, you'll want to take a
look at OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit
from Prentice Hall PTR.

The "kit" consists of a well written tutorial
book and a companion CD-ROM. The book's authors
(Solveig Haughland and Floyd Jones) are salty
veterans in the technical training field, and
it shows in the quality of the text. The CD
contains the OpenOffice.org release itself,
as one might expect. It provides builds for
every supported platform, to include the Mac OS X
developer alpha version. At the time this review
was written, two minor upgrades have been made
available since my book's CD-ROM was pressed.
These are, naturally, available for free via
the OpenOffice.org web-site. In addition to the
releases, the CD includes templates, macros,
and examples from the developer community.
The authors provide additional templates and
resources at http://www.getopenoffice.org

The first five chapters of the book are devoted
to basic issues such as installation, migrating
existing data, printer issues, and global
setup tips. Special guidance is given to users
switching over from StarOffice, or even that
Redmond company's office suite. Speaking of that
company, OpenOffice.org is superb at converting
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files into its own
open formats. The book shows how to use the handy
"AutoPilot", which can perform batch conversions
of your existing data for use with OpenOffice.org's
equivalent applications. Originals are kept safely
intact-- AutoPilot produces converted copies.
This could make a large office transition much
easier, if not completely seamless.

The next six chapters cover the creation of written documents in fantastic detail. The organization of this section is quite intuitive; you'll easily learn how to create a simple letter. When you're ready to write your memoirs, you won't need to buy another book--it's all there: complex
formatting options, page layout functionality,
object manipulation, linking cross-references,
and indexing. And don't forget office goodies like mail merges, label printing, and business cards.

Chapters 13-17 focus entirely on web-page
development. Serious web designers may find this
section bordering on useless, but the casual user
will be able to create a home page without learning a single tag of HTML.

The next several chapters deal with Calc (a
spreadsheet program), Impress (for creating
presentations), and Draw ("the best drawing program you've never used," say the authors). The layout of each section follows the comprehensive example from the earlier chapters detailing OpenOffice.org's word processor, Writer. Basic topics are organized neatly along with the more advanced ones, and neither seem to get in the way of the other. Both the novice and the expert will find very little lacking from this material.

Organizations who deal frequently with databases
will not be disappointed with OpenOffice.org,
either. The final three chapters of the book
explain how to incorporate data from any flavor
database you're likely to be using in your network. Throw in an appendix on macros, and you've got
one very complete tutorial masquerading as an
all-in-one reference. I'm very picky when it comes
to my geek shelf space, and this one gets high
marks in all the important areas: comprehensive,
well organized, and with a great signal-to-noise
ratio.

We have learned that superior open source software
alone isn't always enough to supplant the existing
closed source way of doing things. However,
"document it, and they will come!" The
OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit will go a
long way toward fulfilling that prophecy.

Reader Marcus Green sent in a review of this book as well. Here are some of his thoughts:

In addition to the document management features the book covers the more "Page Layout" style features of StarOffice such as the ability to manage columns and to place vertical text running up the page. These are features I was not even aware existed in StarOffice before I read this book.

The StarOffice companion has over 1030 pages, but it is really bigger than it sounds because it is very dense. Although it has many screen shots, plenty of use is made of text based instructions. Instead of repeating instructions, the text will often point you to the page where a concept was first explained. This does break up the flow of instructions but it also means that the book contains more information than if they had repeated the text every time it was needed.

I found the section on the graphics module useful because I had not realised how StarOffice has some slightly non-standard ways of working with menus and selections. For example I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the 3d shapes menu to pop out and show all the possible shape options. It was only on a closer reading of the text of this book did I appreciate that you need to click and hold down the mouse for a few seconds before the menu pops out.

The tone of the book comes across as being created by people who like the program rather than a creation of a faceless corporation. Thus in the graphics section they have included the amusing Moose with moving fly graphic that is used for the logo of the JavaRanch website. Here is an example of the text style from the section on macros. "Macros can do things like open a file when you do a particular task, process data, or take your grandmothers' credit cards and buy $3000 worth of cat toys." It also features a section titled "Turning Off Annoying Features," which of course is about the autoformatting and word completion.

And even if you don't...does anybody EVER read documentation on something as boring as an office suite? If it isn't intuitive, it should be fixed to begin with.

I agree to a point-- that the *basic* functionality of the office suite should be intuitive (font selection, etc). But you have to realize that many businesses rely on the advanced features of office suites. These features need to be focused around productivity (think vim, emacs) rather than intuitiveness.

I've had quite a bit of experience on the StarOffice side of things (which may as well be OO)... I think that while some things have changed signifcantly, the basic religion is similar enough that you culd still benefit from the book.
For a lot of people brought up on MS Office, there are some new ways of ding things in OO/SO that having a book could help with. Especially page/paragraph/section/character styles. If you do complex technical writing, a bok culd definitely help make the transition.

I'd be happy with soem simple tips on scripting a setup so that "open file" points by default to a user's network drive and so that the display and toolbars are uniform within our firm. I do not relish setting up a dozen computers to make the settings match.

I don't know, but on the Mac you have AppleScript, which works great for scripting any Mac application. You can even create your own standalone applications using AppleScript and AppleScript Studio (free with Apple's dev tools).

So maybe it's time to change platforms?;) Especially now that OpenOffice is coming to MacOS X. It will undoubtedly support AppleScript as well (heck, it probably does already).

Not only was ARexx great for scripting any ARexx-aware application, but more importantly, it could be used to connect any number of such applications together (and not just with a simple pipe of data from one app to another either - a script could be performing some complex operation by tying together two, three, or more apps as a single unified whole).

I always get the feeling that people who have never used an Amiga do not fully appreciate the kind of power that ARexx offers, so let me try to provide a s

Regina [sourceforge.net] is a Rexx [ibm.com] implementation for a variety of platforms, Linux included. It is very good: faithful to Cowlishaw's [ibm.com] language definition yet supporting of all the major extensions, ARexx included. Alas, *nix systems lack the AmigaOS hooks for universal scripting, but Regina does a nice job and can be used in place of all those ugly shell scripts:-)

I know you were just funning, but folks may want to know that the OOo and fontconfig developers are working together, and fontconfig [fontconfig.org] support is likely to appear shortly. This would be a Good Thing: many of my remaining problems with OOo are font-related.

While we're on the subject of StarOffice/OpenOffice, I'm going to post a question about it here because Slashdotters are more likely to be able to anwer than those kids over at the OO forums.

OpenOffice is able to inherit and use the toolkit/widget colors that I select in Linux/KDE. i.e. if my widgets are all brown in other apps, they are also brown in OpenOffice. However, when I am using WindowMaker or another simple managed environment rather than KDE, OpenOffice comes up in Windows NT gray and I can't seem to change that.

I've done an "xrdb -all -edit myrsrcs.txt" from within KDE to grab all the krdb stuff and then an "xrdb myrsrcs.txt" from within WindowMaker, but that didn't help. All of my GTK/GTK2 apps look the way I want them to at this point because my.gtkrc and.gtkrc-2.0 files and relateds are all configured correctly for my color preferences... but OO doesn't seem to see these either (I haven't checked to see if OO is a GTK app at all).

I even tried "kfmclient file:/opt/OpenOffice.org/progrms/swriter" to see if I could get the KDE colors into OO that way without actually having to be logged in to KDE, but it didn't help.

Does anyone know how to change the widget colors in OpenOffice without having to simply log into KDE or GNOME?

P.S. final hint: using the Tools menu is not the right answer, it contains color options for a great many things, but the menu and toolbar widgets are not among them.

Last I checked OpenOffice wasn't a kde application. This means that it does not use any of the kde configuration tools, nor will it be manipulated by any KDE specific configuration methods.

I believe that OpenOffice is a java application, but I'm not going to waste too much time in verifying this. If it is JAVA, then it probably uses Swing which can be customized, but not nearly as much as say, Motif. Swing uses a pluggable look and feel, but if you wish to "roll your own" PLAF, you'd better be in it for

OpenOffice is an X applicaton, but it does not create "X" objects in the traditional sense.

Before JAVA 1.2 (AKA JAVA 2) the AWT toolkit used the underlying operating system's GUI environment to draw buttons, menus, and whatever to the screen. Eventually SUN got a lot of egg on it's face because the GUI environments for all of their supported platforms had bugs in them, and people would associate these bugs with JAVA, so JAVA seem to have a buggy GUI.

It is probably reading the KDE settings from the file ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals. Older versions of KDE stored them in ~/.kderc so look there as well. The file is text in the "INI" style format, so it should be possible to edit it with a text editor.

You can also run the "kcontrol" program without running KDE and mess with the color settings in there.

Yes, I realize that the.Xdefaults file contains the local X resource database.

When I log into kde and do "xrdb -all -edit myfile.txt" it saves all of the.Xdefaults-style information created by KDE to the file. Then, when I log into WindowMaker and do "xrdb myfile.txt" it loads all of that information from KDE and applies it, just as if it were in an.Xdefaults file.

Unfortunately, it doesn't help. It works on all other applications that KDE normally affects (including old X apps like xv and Athena-based

I can't even understand your QUESTION, now tell me how is this piece of bloatware shit ever going to get mass appeal? Are you going to tell your mom, "Hey mom, how is the dog, OK try this kfmclient file:/opt/OpenOffice.org/progrms/swriter"

That's right, you don't understand the question. His problem was already fixed by KDE. Your mom doesn't need to know anything about it if she uses a distro that defaults to KDE; it automagically sets OOo's colors. For your mom, this is a non-problem. KDE papered over th

The more I use it (on both Linux and Windows) the more bugs and crashes I see. Granted, the more you use any particular application the more bugs you'll see - but OpenOffice Writer is the only application that I use that always seems to suprise me with an amazing crash or wild bug every single time I use it. Take for instance what happened about 5 minutes ago - when printing a document the window resized itself wildly, crashed, and the system locked up.

Please respond to the OpenOffice team with your problems. Often they are already fixed, and updating your installation is all you need. However, you cannot expect them to fix something you never tell them about.

I like open source software. I like how it works. I like how I work when I'm using it. But using open source software is a bit of a social contract. Either pay back the developers with bug reports, or it shouldn't be important enough to complain about (to anyone).

Sometimes the bugs won't get fixed. Now THATS when you should REALLY complain!

In a revolution compared to 1.0, the new 1.1 OpenOffice RC apps open almost instantaneously, offer much improved Word import, and process some of my day-to-day recursive spreadsheets about 10x faster than before.

I'm using OpenOffice 1.1 on an optimized gentoo linux installation running on an Athlon XP 1900+ 256MB and 80GB Western Digital special edition harddrive and it still takes about 50 seconds to load for the first time if no quickstarting is used.Even after loading it still feels like a java app with slight delays in menu appearance, although I'm sure whatever parts of OO are written in java have been compiled to native code.In short, performance is STILL a major issue not to mention the UI could use some twe

OOo takes about 5 or 6 seconds to load for me. It's a bit laggy if I leave it for a while, but it picks up to speed as I use it. I think that something is wrong with your configuration/setup since mine _should_ be about 20-30% SLOWER than yours and it's 900% faster.

BTW, my memory usage is about 75MB with OOo loaded, not including cache or buffers.

I've just emerge the latest Abiword 1.99.1, and I am going to switch completely from OO to Abiword. It is lightening fast (takes well under 1 second to open, often is instantaneous), handles Word fine. OO is too slow and too sensitive to changes in JVM every time I upgrade. procman tells me Abiword is taking 13.7MB with empty document, and 20.4MB with a 2.5 page CV open. Perfect for my lightweight WP needs.

for our OpenOffice.org training classes and it is quite good. The customers/students have really given posotive feedback about it not only as a classroom textbook, but also as a reference for ongoing use. For what it's worth.

For those that complain about documents not looking the same in OO as in Microsoft Word because of the fonts, please think out of the box and consider that you don't have the exact same fonts available. The same happens with Microsoft Word if someone uses a special font you dont have in your system. Complaining about this is like complaining that water is wet or fire burns. I mean, isn't it obvious? You are replacing software, not a stinking china tea set. Now, having vented my anger, please look at

http://avi.alkalay.net/software/msfonts/

for a solution. Hint, just get Microsoft fontpack.

One more thing, Microsoft supplies free viewers for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. They even run inside Wine. Google for them. I run OO with Windows 2000 and have these viewers installed, plus the fonts. What can i say? It works.

Mac OS X (X11) 1.0.3 Final has been out for three weeks now, and it's been out of alpha since last October. If the review is correct and the CD contains the alpha version, I think the book is just a tad out of date.

If you're looking to get OpenOffice.org for the Mac, you should get the GM from the official download site [openoffice.org] and not use what's on the CD with this book. As the "GM" implies, there were lots of bugs fixed between the "Final Beta" and "GM", and definitely lots of serious issues were fixed since the alpha.

If you're on another platform, you should probably check the version on the CD as well. Even though it's now being called a "legacy build", the latest stable version is 1.0.3.1 [openoffice.org] which fixes nasty printing errors in 1.0.3 on other platforms (didn't happen on the Mac! woo hoo!). The "RC" in 1.1 RC stands for "Release Candidate", so if you're thinking of going the whole way to 1.1 you may want to wait until the RC is dropped from the name.

I guess, in short, don't buy this book just to get OpenOffice.org on a CD since you'll probably have to download a newer version anyway.

Considering that it usually takes months to get a book on the shelves after the last word was written, I hope we can excuse the inclusion of old software and old reference to "upcoming items" which have already been released.

Remember, there's marketing, proofreading, typesetting, printing, binding, warehousing,distribution, and shelving which all have to be done before you invest your time and money by buying it and reading it. Technology continually speeds up some of these steps, but it will never be automatic. It's just the price you pay for a printed book.

The web can provide you with the latest info, distro, whatever; however, it is a rare website which pours as much effort into one of its articles as a good author / editor / publisher is willing to put into a book.

...we use OpenOffice to repair hopelessly munged-up Microsoft Word documents - which happens more often than anybody is willing to admit. I used to fix all the formatting fubars with WordPerfect but the two products have diverged so much in the last two years that we've discontinued using WordPerfect for anything. Anyway, everytime I get a user who asks me why she can't get her headers and columns to do such-and-such I snarf a copy off his/her server, import it into OO, undo the hideousness (sp?) and export it back out. And it generally stays fixed, even after subsequent exposures to MS Word, plus it's a lot smaller.

After flirting with the old staroffice, and code-weavers wine-office I decided to installthe newopenoffice and I was amazed at how mature the suite is.

You mentioned that you import from word and then export back to word and thatit stays fixed without any problems. Now, that sounds impressive. I couldnt figure outhow to export back to word (export doesnt have MS-format option). How do you do it?I am using the Beta2 version.. maybe this feature is only in the 1.1rc ?

I think reviews like this are not so much uncritical as inept [slashdot.org]. If Eater was out to con us into buying books, he'd write the ignorant BS you see in press releases and on dust jackets. Instead, he tried to endorse a book he likes, but was unable to explain why he liked it.

OK, not everybody's cut out to be a book reviewer. But what are the Slashdot editors for if not to filter out content-free submissions? They seem less and less concerned with doing this.

Speaking of that company, OpenOffice.org is superb at converting Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files into its own open formats.

Superb? Uh...no. I recently built a new computer and rather than pay for (or try to bootleg) a copy of Office, I downloaded and installed OO 1.0.3.

I've since tried to open several different Word 2000 documents in OO and not one has converted properly. The worst one was a brochure I did for my wife's jewelry business--a standard two-page three-column brochure with some imbedded

Every vendor of an MS Office alternative has set of documents that convert easily and "prove" that interoperability is not an problem. But converting a few samples proves nothing, even if the samples are "typical". In the real world, you can't interoperate unless you have a foolproof filter that's general. And people refuse to see how difficult that is. It'd basically require a breakthrough in AI!

I'd like to see OpenOffice succeed, I really would. It's got so much about it that's cool. I'm particularly an

If I do anything fancier than a three-column brochure, I probably will have to go to a fancier desktop publishing app. But, originally, I did the brochure as more of an "oh crap, we've got a craft show coming up and a brochure would be nice, and I've got some pictures over in this folder, I better get to typing" kind of thing.

Is there any decent desktop publishing software for Windoze that doesn't cost an arm, a leg, and a testicle?

Back on OO, I don't want to be seen as slamming it. I like it. I like i

I find the OO draw program nigh unto useless. This doesn't mean that I know of a good replacement, just that it's so bad it's unuseable.

I feel guilty about panning this module so strongly when I'm not offering to help fix it. But my attention is elsewhere. I have, however, bought a separate machine and Deneba Canvas, so I don't have a real need for the OOo drawing module. But if I had to use this, I'd be quite desperate indeed.

Holly crap is it the most complex thing I have ever seen with the exception of VTK. THis review does not lie when it says the material feels like its more then 1033 pages and is very dense. Its more complex then even the whole entire java2 api.

Their is a VB like macro language and uno(unified network object )set of api's for use in OO's VB, C++, and Java. Uno is talked about most. Also com/ole is supported on the windows version and the online version of the book at openoffice.org has great detail into it.

Can you please spare us "reviews" that are just a list of chapter summaries? Yes, we need to know what the book covers, but a very short list of topics is actually more informative. A technical book review should cover not just what the book explains, but how it explains, and why the reviewer thinks this is good or bad.

What problems have you had with opening MS Word docs? I've been using OO.o for a while, using myself as a test subject to see if we could replace all/some of our MS Office suites with something comparable. I haven't noticed any problems, but I'd like to hear what other people have issues with.

What problems have you had with opening MS Word docs? I've been using OO.o for a while, using myself as a test subject to see if we could replace all/some of our MS Office suites with something comparable. I haven't noticed any problems, but I'd like to hear what other people have issues

Well I'm using OpenOffice 1.0.2. I understand that it's not the latest one but it is a 1.0 version.

When I'm importing MS Word docs, I'm able to read the documents but the fonts are sometime mess up. Also Printing an imp

but the fonts are sometime mess upHow do you mean? Like Times New Roman becomes Helvetica without you changing it, or the fonts just look bad?Printing an imported MS Word document never looks the same way as printing an original MS Word document.Are you printing using OO.o in windows? Printing in Linux is pretty crappy over all (IMHO), so it's probably unfair to compare printing in OO.o under Linux to printing under MS Word in Windows.

Also Printing an imported MS Word document never looks the same way as printing an original MS Word document.

I used to work for Kinko's way back when, and companies would send us documents created in Word 97, We'd open them in Word 97, and I'll be damned if Word couldn't format the stupid thing correctly. Bottom line is that people have been joking about MS Word not opening MS Word documents correctly, and they're not joking.

My experience with OO is that it will open a good 95% of what MS Office docs I throw at it. Haven't tried pivot tables or Docs with TOC's yet, though.

I remember reading that most of the filter improvements in the 1.1 series are also in 1.0.3.x. My few experiments seem to confirm this. For example, a word document that I opened in 1.0.2 did not look like the MS word original, but when I tried in 1.0.3, it looked identical. Now this may not be true for all documents, but upgrading to 1.0.3 may solve some of your import problems.

...When I'm importing MS Word docs, I'm able to read the documents but the fonts are s

The first thing I do when that happens isn't to adjusts my printer configuration or my fonts. It isn't to reconfigure my software. I rush out and buy a brand new copy of Office XP. Because it fixes everything for only $354.99 [amazon.com].

At that price you save $121.01, 26% over list price and all the trouble of dealing with open source.

Our company template uses numbered tables, but OO displays numbers that are different from MSO. For example, if there is a table "1" in section "5.1" than in MSO the number is "5.1.1" but in OO it becomes "5.1-5.1.1" which is rather ugly.

In the table of contents, there is a bit of space between the section number and title in MSO, but OO concatenates the number and title, which also looks ugly.

We also spotted an empty chapter 1 before the actual text started, which was not present in the MSO interpretat

I have spent more years of my life working with Microsoft Word than I care to contemplate at this juncture. I assure you that the problems you're describing are not inherent to porting documents from Word to OO. They're problems which you will see whenever you open a document with a word processing program which is not configured the same as the word processing program which originated the document.

Most people don't notice this problem because most people never bother to change the default Word configurations. If Mary makes a Word document and sends it to Steve, and they're both using Word's defaults, it will look exactly the same when Steve opens it. However, if Mary then sends her Word document to Bob (who has spent many hours configuring Word to his liking) Bob's instance of Word will "translate" Mary's document into Bob's preferred formatting. Or rather, it will attempt to do so, with varying degrees of success.

I have personally had to tackle the problem of importing Word documents into Word more times than you can possibly imagine. I've also had to import Open Office documents into Open Office. The problem isn't that "Word sucks" or "Open Office sucks." The problem is that both programs need to find a way to properly import formatting rules on a per-document basis.

(Of course, that's easy for me to say, isn't it? I'm not the one trying to program it, am I?)

Anyway, the parent is only part of the truth. I can say from extensive experience with Word in a legal environment that yes, in fact Word documents do blow up when opened in Word. Number formatting is a big problem, but really any time you have a document stretching over 100 pages or so you're asking for all sorts of weird problems. Not every one, but maybe 1 in a couple hundred or so. Take a library with several million documents and

is that it simply doesn't import MS Word documents properly. MS Word is the still the norm wether you like it or not.

So we have two choices to what we can do.

Give up.

Support OOo whenever possible. By contributing, donating, or just using it when ever it makes sense for the project.

I'm not much of a defeatist, so I'm going with option 2.

Besides, it imports simple word docs fine. And really, Word is a word processor, not a page layout program. If you really want to do some fancy stuff neither word nor OOo are good. Go get pagemaker or quark.

Besides, it imports simple word docs fine. And really, Word is a word processor, not a page layout program. If you really want to do some fancy stuff neither word nor OOo are good. Go get pagemaker or quark.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll email my girlfriend to learn to use pagemaker if she just wants to send me her CV to print out for her. (She has no printer at home)...

I don't have a problem with the software when I'm writing a doc. It's when I'm importing a doc. i.e. I didn't write it.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll email my girlfriend to learn to use pagemaker if she just wants to send me her CV to print out for her. (She has no printer at home)...

Well, your girlfriend could write her document in OOo, thus eliminating compatibility problems between you. BTW, if she can't even afford a cheap printer (~$35) how in the heck can she afford MS Office? Have you tried saving Word docs in RTF, then importing this into OOo? RTF is suprisingly capable, able to keep images, tables, etc. quit

I don't think it's sad. After all, I have a secret light socket which I've been developing without the use of standards committees.

If you wish to gain access to this light socket, you need to give me the electrical cord of the appliance of your choice, and I will route it through the 2x2x2 iron safe that protects my newly created intellectual property. If you throw tons of cash at me, I might allow you to look at the plug directly, but only on the condition that I can prevent you from telling anyone else

The fact that everyone wants to deny is that MS changes Word formats so often that, out of the box, Word itself has trouble opening up older or cross-platform formats. This has always been the case.

For instance, the version that was realized around the time of Windows 3.11 did not by default install the filters needed to load Word files from many other versions of word, particularly DOS and Macintosh. Even when the filters were installed, corruption of data was common.

More recently certain versions and installations of Word 2000 seemed to chew up my Word 95 files. Headers went missing, text was garbles, all sorts of stuff.

The reality is that MS is so obsessed in keeping monopoly though the closed and convoluted Word format, that they do not seem to care if inter-version file can be moved perfectly. Likewise, they are so obsessed with all user upgrading with every version, they do not seem feel responsible about full support of older formats.

What we need is a really inclusive formatted text file format. If companies like Sun, IBM, Redhat, and Thinkfree would just get together to come up with something, then there could be a competitive force. RTF just does not seem good enough. At this point MS is no longer selling the tool, but the file format. The competition needs to be on that basis.

What we need is a really inclusive formatted text file format. If companies like Sun, IBM, Redhat, and Thinkfree would just get together to come up with something, then there could be a competitive force.

There's a really easy way to deal with the word problem. Refuse to send out or recieve documents in proprietary formats. Just stick with plaintext and PDF, OpenOffice does both just fine. It will piss off customers and co-workers, but if more and more people use OpenOffice and start refusing to mess with Word files, eventually the better file formats will catch on.

Seriously, something has got to happen in terms of standardization. I got very strange looks when I told my office that I wasn't able to fill out the excel-embedded-in-word timesheet and the'd have to accept tab-delimited text files instead. Come to think of it, maybe that's why they put me on salary, so the HR-queen wouldn't have to transfer all my text timesheets to the company format each week.